SUNDAY 11 May 2025 was Mother’s Day. An anonymous post which went viral on social media read: “The most savage pain I ever felt in my life was when my mother passed away. It stuck on my heart and for months, I could not shake it off. I could see my young children getting confused by crying for my old mother (their Granny) the same way they did for their mother (my wife). “In his consolation, my mother’s twin brother assured me the pain would go away.
He said, ‘Anogona kunyaradza ndeakambofirwawo.’ And they had lost their own mother at the age of 12 and it would be another 12 years before I was born. We were given another mother, the youngest among my mother’s sisters. She had actually been her favourite and because of that we were very close and she f it her shoes well. “Decades later, at the unveiling of her tombstone, I was asked to give a testimony and my speech was full of jokes and laughter with not a trace of the anguish I had felt immediately after she passed on.
While acknowledging kuti my mother had not been perfect I persuaded those who had come to celebrate her life with us to accept that everyone had a right to call their mother the best.” The long and short of the post seemed to be that Mother’s Day was basically a celebration of the positive side of life made possible by mothers. We were all ‘mothered’.
All of us! From the most senior citizen to the youngest citizen. We were all conceived and ‘incubated’ to safe term in the wombs of our mothers, sometimes at the risk of losing their own lives to give us our own. And we were born through savage labour pains and breastfed, taught to sit, crawl, walk and talk by mothers. We speak mother tongues taught by our mothers and the mother tongue is, in essence, not inert but a post-birth installation of the worldviews we carry.
The metaphor, ‘motherland’, is, in essence, an expression of the immensity of the mother’s role in sustaining us. Across the world, generations of all of us children who were aware of the existence of the day were celebrating their mothers. Two snap surveys in the bustling ‘dormitory’ town of Chitungwiza and the posh leafy suburb of Borrowdale showed that Mother’s’ Day is a tale of two classes — one f ilthy rich and the other wallowing in poverty.
At Chigovanyika Shopping Centre, St Mary’s, only a handful of people were aware that such a day even existed. Their focus was merely on putting ‘something’ on the table and it was business as usual on the ‘touchline’ selling and buying basic needs re-packaged to minimalist survival quantities (tsaona). At Sam Levy’s Village in Borrowdale, Mother’s Day was advertised in shops and restaurants and was being touted as self-actualisation. Finger-licking lunches more expensive than Government pension payouts were being devoured in a single sitting. It was being indulged as a surplus.
The discrepancy exposed by the two snap surveys makes everything about Mothers’ Day newsworthy. The very existence of the day on our calendar; awareness by some people that it exists; ignorance by many others; the mothers who are the objects of celebration; just the idea of a Mother’s Day. The discrepancy inadvertently drew attention to the stereotype of the celebrated mother. And, the stereotype is one of a doting and selfless woman who sacrificed everything to get their children to succeed; the woman who was always there for ‘the successful child’; the indispensable factor in every hero’s life. On social media, the most outlandish beautiful things were said about mothers and the most beautiful messages were sent to them.
Every praise was in the superlative. All mothers were described as victims, as brave, as angels and as heroes. And that, of course, is what social media does. It is a frenzy and frenzies are bandwagons that get people carried away. And, it is this frenzy that sensationalised Mother’s Day into a brush that extravagantly painted all mothers in the colour of goodness to the point where those socialised assumed that it was a universal truth notwithstanding that it excluded children and mothers who were too poor to afford the gadgets and the airtime to publish their stories on social media.
And, much of that media hyperbole has become acceptable as a harmless lie understandably touched off by the euphoria to celebrate the great meanings attached to the heroic but flawed efforts of well-meaning mothers. Hyperbole is art and it must be conceded that at no time in the history of art has its definition as A LIE been more appropriate as now, in this great age of Artificial Intelligence. While it may seem needless to mention it, it is still pertinent to reiterate that mothers belong to the weaker sex because that seems to be the reason why many of their feats, no matter how ‘token’ come up in superlative.
They come up as ‘best’, ‘bravest’, ‘angelic’ and ‘most loving’. But the concession should be imperative that superlatives are not self-sustaining units of meaning. They are, essentially, comparative and, in that respect, they do not only amplify the good qualities they are deployed to illuminate. They also suggest the reverse or opposite. In Shona, the defining idiom would be: Manga chena inoparira parere nhema (white exposes black).
The meaning of this, in context, is that the stereotype of the loving and selfless woman who sacrif iced everything to get a child to succeed does not end in itself. It also simultaneously, conversely, silently and inexo-rably suggests the existence of a host of other mothers excluded by the type; the lazy ones, the freeloaders, frauds, slay queens and blackmailers; the mothers who spoiled children, raised miscreants or simply walked away from the responsibilities of motherhood.
In the foregoing respect, the stereotype of a deeply loving and selfless mother becomes, in the reverse sense, an ‘echoing silence’ on the selfish ‘black-tax’ collector overstretching a mother’s entitlement and perpetually levying children with the threat: Ndini ndakakubereka, kuti ufambe nemotokari; kuti utsike ivhu reZimbabwe zvakabva kuneni. The stereotype of a perfect, loving mother also inadvertently becomes the silent post of a missing-in-action mysterious woman who left a baby on the doorstep of a church and disappeared into the night. The stereotype of perfect, loving mothers also foregrounds the mysterious mothers who keep orphanages and children’s homes populated.
The stereotype of perfect, loving mothers further foregrounds other mothers in prison for crimes that include abuse of children not only their own but innocent stepchildren, too. Other crimes include peddling drugs that reduce the lives of other mothers’ children to waste. Some mothers are in jail for killing their own children even after raising them to adulthood. The possibility as well as the impossibility of this notion are often both An idiom in Shona language describes this experience as huku inonwa mazai ayo.
Chenjerai kupururudzira n’anga neinobata mai is also an oblique reference to this type of rogue mother. In that respect, it is imperative to mention that no language names things outside the speaker’s own experiences. It is pertinent to note that the words muroyi, mhandu, nharadada all predate colonisation as they referred to homebred wayward characte, mothers included. The expression, hupenzi hwechembere hwakabvira kumahumbwe, has its roots in foolish old mothers of yesteryear. The perfect stereotype also points to other mothers-in-law (amwene naambuya) making life unliveable for the daughters and sons of other mothers. The stepmother is often wrapped in the same blanket.
Then there is the mother whose power base grows with the children, progressively excluding the father from the empowerment he sacrificed his own life to give the children; the mother who turns the children against their father and his people. And then, thanks to Tinashe Mugabe’s DNA programme, a gigantic Pandora’s box that has been opened; a gigantic Pandora’s box hiding another breed of mothers who have destroyed the lives of countless husbands and children from the moment the results are made public: “The alleged father is excluded as the biological father of the tested child. The probability of paternity is 0%.” This article is not an end in itself. It is not intended to be conclusive or prescriptive. Its purpose is solely to offer a few of plural perspectives to elicit objective debate.
To be continued